You should also avoid words that have more than one spelling if your visitors are likely to be confused and mistype the name. Alternately, you can buy both versions of the name and direct visitors from the one you like less to the preferred name. While you do want a short name (see below), don’t go for something so cryptic that people have a hard time remembering it. Word of mouth is a powerful marketing tool and you want to make it easy for people to tell their friends about your site.

Next, someone has to tell the rest of the Internet that google.com points to 216.58.214.14. This is done by a “registry”, which is also the wholeseller that provides domains to registrars. Each top-level domain (TLD) — .com, .net., .org etc — has a registry that manages it. The .com TLD has been managed by the same registry since the beginning of time — an extremely profitable monopoly called Verisign. More on that later.
iPage's web hosting packages start as low as $1.99 per month and they throw in domain registration for free during the first year, which makes them a bargain for very, very lean startups or one-person operations. They also have the classic domain name search portal, and provide a tutorial on the new TLDs that helps, considering a new one seems to be appearing every second or two.
It is also possible to setup a personalised or branded email address that simply forwards email to an existing inbox you may already have elsewhere such as Gmail, Yahoo or similar. This way, you can continue using your existing email address and receive your emails through your branded domain name. To send from your personalised address you will need an email mailbox account.
If you have a web site, you should seriously consider registering your own domain name. A domain name is a name like "thesitewizard.com" or "thefreecountry.com", which you can use to refer to your website. Note that you do not have to be a company or organisation ("organization" if you use a different variant of English) to register a domain name. Any individual can do it too.
A fictitious domain name is a domain name used in a work of fiction or popular culture to refer to a domain that does not actually exist, often with invalid or unofficial top-level domains such as ".web", a usage exactly analogous to the dummy 555 telephone number prefix used in film and other media. The canonical fictitious domain name is "example.com", specifically set aside by IANA in RFC 2606 for such use, along with the .example TLD.
Sedo is where I bought my domain - over Escrow - and is a global marketplace to buy, sell, and park domain names. They've over 18 million domain names for sale, but the big part is that they're a huge, well-respected company. This may not be important if you're spending $150 on a domain, but in a $15,000+ purchase - which happens in many cases - you will be potentially buying from a foreign entity, that you don't know, and many of them will suggest an escrow payment. This means you put the money in an account owned by a third party that will hold it and only pass it on once the domain has been transferred over into their name (which in this case is what Sedo does). This can be quite disconcerting - but Sedo is well-known and has done many, many deals - and the process is about as full of hand-holding as handing tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars for a domain name can be.
Dotster.com — This registrar provides fairly cheap domain prices ($15.75 plus 20 cents per domain), a convenient web interface to manage your domains, an optional privacy facility where your domain name is registered in the name of a proxy company, etc. They offer .com, .net, .org, .biz, .info, .us, .ca, .tv, .name, .cc, .de, .sr, .md, .co.uk, .us.com domains, etc. If you're transferring a domain here from other registrars, the price is even cheaper ($6.99 plus 20 cents). Both credit card and PayPal payments are accepted here.
SnapNames is a web domain name marketplace - meaning that they only deal specifically with domains that are currently owned by somebody else. They offer daily and premium auctions, private brokerage of domains, and buy-it-now listings for buying and selling domain names, including over 30 million domain names that aren't all, as you'll find on some services, exorbitant. They have over three million customers, including a significant number of small businesses, which is worth it.
Many desirable domain names are already assigned and users must search for other acceptable names, using Web-based search features, or WHOIS and dig operating system tools. Many registrars have implemented domain name suggestion tools which search domain name databases and suggest available alternative domain names related to keywords provided by the user.
The dispute was over the innocently-named Site Finder Service, launched by Verisign in 2003. With traffic to every .com domain going through Verisign, the Site Finder Service redirected anyone accessing an unregistered domain (via a typo, for example) to a Verisign website with sponsored links. The company argued that this was more useful to Internet users than seeing a generic error page. Whatever their reasoning, this made Verisign the de-facto owner of every unregistered domain (what else does it mean to own a domain?), and skyrocketed them from 2,500th into the top 10 most visited websites. The best part? Verisign launched this without running it past anyone.
The way that competition is supposed to work between registries, is that lots of companies go to ICANN and say “We think we can reliably manage .com, and we think it would cost us [$5] per domain.” ICANN reviews these bids and awards the .com contract, which lasts for a fixed period of time, to whomever they deem best-suited to the job. In this time, other companies can think of ways to manage .com better/cheaper, and try and win the next contract. This, in theory, would provide an incentive for registries to innovate, a big part of which would be in lowering costs.
Looking to purchase web hosting too when you buy domain names? We'll be more than happy to help you with that as well. Your website will be hosted on our high performance SwiftServer platform. Best of all, we offer completely scalable hosting solutions that can support your site as it grows. There's no need to switch hosting providers because we'll have a solution that fits your needs. Choose from Shared, Reseller, VPS and Dedicated Server solutions.
Official marketplaces offer a third possibility for domain traders to peddle their product. Domain marketplaces, such as Sedo, GoDaddy.com, or BuyDomains.com, link potential buyers with domain holders hoping to sell their prized virtual property. These platforms function as a kind of domain real estate agency and are known to demand somewhat high prices for their services.
If you ever change your web host (the actual physical location of your website files), your domain name goes with you. Your regular visitors or customers who knew your site name as (say) www.thesitewizard.com would not have to be informed about a change of web address (also known as "URL"), since as far as they are concerned, the site is still at the same place. They would simply type your domain name and they'd be transparently brought to your new location.
For more than a decade, Jeffrey L. Wilson has penned gadget- and video game-related nerd-copy for a variety of publications, including 1UP, 2D-X, The Cask, Laptop, LifeStyler, Parenting, Sync, Wise Bread, and WWE. He now brings his knowledge and skillset to PCMag as Senior Analyst. When he isn't staring at a monitor (or two) and churning out web... See Full Bio

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